With the advent of increasingly sophisticated telecommunication services, various proposals have been made to allow a single call, incoming to a telecommunication switch, to branch into multiple, independent outgoing calls (or legs) to different called parties, during the same period of time. These incoming and multiple outgoing calls may be wireline, such as PSTN (public switched telephone network), ISDN (integrated services digital network), or T1/E1 wireline calls, or may be wireless, such as cellular calls or other mobile service communications.
Once such proposal is included in the ANSI-41 specification promulgated by the American National Standards Institute for wireless telecommunication, such as cellular communication, and is referred to as "flexible alerting". The ANSI-41 flexible alerting specification, however, does not include any specific directions or guidelines for implementation and control of such independent, concurrent outgoing multiple leg calls.
Other prior art systems also do not provide for multiple outgoing calls, to different parties, during the same time period. Rather, such known systems provide for individual, sequential calls rather than multiple, concurrent outgoing calls. For example, the incoming call may first alert a home telephone having a first directory number; if the first call is unanswered, that call leg is dropped and a second telephone having a different, second directory number is alerted, such as a cellular phone. If the second call is unanswered, that second call leg is dropped, and a third line having a third directory number is alerted, such as a pager.
In such flexible alerting or other systems having multiple, independent outgoing call legs from a single incoming call leg, whichever outgoing call leg is first to answer will receive the call and be connected to the calling party, with the other call legs being released (i.e., dropped or torn down, with their corresponding alerting ceased). A particular difficulty with such multiple outgoing call legs arises because of the processing time required to connect the answering outgoing call leg to the incoming call leg of the calling party. This processing or connecting time may result in a time gap between when the called party answers the outgoing call leg and when the called party is actually connected to the calling party and actual communication may occur.
If such a processing or connection time period is unknown to the called party, the called party may begin communication prior to completion of the actual connection with the calling party. During such premature communication, i.e., intended communication occurring prior to completion of the actual communication connection, significant information may be lost or clipped, resulting in customer irritation, frustration, and customer complaints to the service provider. For example, greetings such as "hello", while verbalized by the called party, may not actually be communicated and received by the calling party, resulting in subscriber dissatisfaction.
As a consequence, a need remains for an apparatus, method and system to implement and control multiple, independent outgoing communication sessions (or call legs or links) originating from a single incoming call leg. Such an apparatus, method and system should also provide information, to the called party of the answering outgoing call leg, indicative of a such a processing or connecting time period. The information provided to the called party should distinguish a flexible alerting call leg or other multiple outgoing call leg from other types of communication sessions, thereby indicating to the called party that the answered call has a processing or connection time period and that actual communication is not yet available. Such an apparatus, method and system should also be user friendly and user transparent.